BS: Penpals-anyone still write

Subject: BS: Penpals-anyone still write
From: I don't know
Date: 05 Jul 11 - 07:28 AM

I was talking to a friend about how hard I find letter writing & not many people seen to do it these days, when she told me she writes to 10 penpals every month, 7 who she has never meet but started writing to as part of a school project back in 1967. Any of you write letters as a hobby?

Subject: RE: BS: Penpals-anyone still write
From: Wesley S
Date: 05 Jul 11 - 07:31 AM

My sister has had a penpal in England for almost 50 years now.

Subject: RE: BS: Penpals-anyone still write
From: maeve
Date: 05 Jul 11 - 07:52 AM

I did until the fire. I don't have addresses for most of those friends anymore.

Subject: RE: BS: Penpals-anyone still write
From: saulgoldie
Date: 05 Jul 11 - 09:09 AM

I have written letters over the years with a few people from my fountain pen world. It is a bit erratic on both ends. But I still do write. I find that writing with a real pen is very satisfying on many levels. And I and they (if they keep the letters) have a running journal of sorts.

Saul

Subject: RE: BS: Penpals-anyone still write
From: I don't know
Date: 05 Jul 11 - 10:05 AM

Sorry to hear you lost those address Maeve,maybe some of them will seek you out again in your new home.
Saul, lovely to hear someone still uses a fountain pen & not a biro. hopefully your friends have kept the letters. My grandmother kept every letter, christmas,birthday & other cards ever sent her, my cousin now has a lifetime collection to store but nice for historical refrence.

Subject: RE: BS: Penpals-anyone still write
From: Little Hawk
Date: 05 Jul 11 - 03:26 PM

I haven't done so since the 1980s.

Subject: RE: BS: Penpals-anyone still write
From: Don Firth
Date: 05 Jul 11 - 06:36 PM

My father had absolute beautiful handwriting. Cursive, a sort of script that he had been taught in school. My own handwriting wasn't quite up to his, but if I say so myself, it was also pretty good. Like fairly fancy script, but very readable. I had been taught it by my sixth grade teacher, and I was rather proud of it.

All of my papers (including short stories, essays, and book reports) in high school were handwritten with a fountain pen. Then, when I started university, I got a Royal portable typewriter, which I used extensively until I got a Adler electric typewriter. Then, I got a KayPro II portable computer (if you consider 27 lbs. "portable")—CP/M operating system, and a copy of WordStar. I've had several generations of computers since the KayPro was retired.

With these machines, I've cranked out a substantial amount of prose:   a couple dozen magazine articles, a number of essays, a short story or two, two abortive attempts at a science fiction novel, and most of a book on the folk scene in the Seattle area during the 1950s and 60s. Not to mention innumerable e-mails, and a shameful number of Mudcat posts over the past twelve years.

Some time back, I picked up Dragon Naturally Speaking, a voice recognition program, which I have been using off and on since. With this, and a small head-set (earphone with small boom mic attached), you can talk to the computer and what you say appears on the screen. Very handy indeed!

And with all that typing and dictating, my handwriting, of which I used to be so proud, has degenerated to the point where, when I write a check or hand-address an envelope, unless I do it in block letters, it looks like ancient Icelandic runes translated into Aztec hieroglyphics, then translated in turn into the Cyrillic alphabet, and hand written by an inebriated orangutan with the palsy.

I have a couple of really nice fountain pens in my desk drawer.   I will have to clean the dried ink out of them, check their condition in general, then, gas them up and spend some time practicing the nice loops and whorls my sixth-grade teacher taught me.

Handwriting is a lost art. When I watch people write these days, I am amazed at some of the weird ways they hold a pen or pencil. No wonder their handwriting looks even worse than mine!

Once I received one of these catalogs in the mail that listed gifts for the person who has everything. One of the items was listed as "Shakespeare's Pen Set." $19.95. It looked like THIS. It included four quills (goose feathers?), not with the point cut, shaped, and split, like Shakespeare would have had to do before he penned a Masterpiece, but with unobtrusive brass sockets into which you could insert any one of a selection of nibs. A bit of recent technology (metal pen points), but they functioned and looked like the kind of writing implement that had served people well for centuries. I almost sent for one. I wish now that I had!

Thank you, I don't know, for starting this thread. I'm gonna get off my butt and clean and load my fountain pens!

In this era of computers, e-mail, cell phones, throw-away ball-point pens, grab-and-go coffee shops and restaurants, and fast-food places that throw hamburgers out the window at passing cars, there is simply not enough elegance anymore!

Can we do something about that?

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Penpals-anyone still write
From: ChanteyLass
Date: 05 Jul 11 - 09:23 PM

My childhood penpal and I are still in touch, but now we send long emails every few weeks instead of writing. We include short handwritten notes in our snailmail Christmas and birthday cards. We went directly from handwritten letters to emails. We never used a typewriter to communicate.

My 10-year-old grandson lives with his mom and her parents in California. They moved there from RI, where he was born and lived until he was 7 or 8. His dad, my son, lives in RI, too. Almost every week I write the longest message I can fit onto a postcard to send him. On special occasions I include the message in a regular card. I have wonderful friends who buy postcards for me whenever they travel to places I don't go. He would have a good collection of postcards, but I doubt he can keep them. He lives on a boat in a marina, and space is limited. He'll be here for two weeks later this month, but he was only here for four days between Christmas and the New Year's Day. I don't send post cards when he is here.

Subject: RE: BS: Penpals-anyone still write
From: Little Hawk
Date: 05 Jul 11 - 10:27 PM

Shoeing horses is a lost art these days too, but we seem to be managing somehow...

Subject: RE: BS: Penpals-anyone still write
From: LilyFestre
Date: 05 Jul 11 - 10:44 PM

I love to write and receive letters!!! Ever since I had chemotherapy, it hurts my hand to write for very long so I don't write as much or as often anymore.

Michelle

Subject: RE: BS: Penpals-anyone still write
From: I don't know
Date: 06 Jul 11 - 04:50 AM

Writing is a dying art so it is nice to know someone still does & yes fountain pens are better than biros by far. Having started this thread I will now be also digging out the fountain pen given to me for my 13th birthday by my grandmother & start practising to write properly again.
It is lovely to recieve letters & cards & to put thought into a reply is far better when the time has been taken to write it yourself, making up the verses is a time well spent to personlise an item.